Doesn’t the equipment used for reproducing the soundstage matter in A/B testing? I haven’t done a rigorous test myself, because I’m comfortable having a predilection for high fidelity audio even if it isn’t demonstrably/empirically superior. But in my experience listening to music on a “audiophile” or “studio reference” setup, when the equipment is sufficiently sensitive and well engineered as to most accurately render the audio signal, I recall rather obviously noticing a difference in sound quality.
I can’t imagine if you compare a 192kbps MP3 with a DSD256 audio file played on reference monitors from a high performance DAC there’d be no audible difference. Personally, using a McIntosh integrated amp and Focal Utopia headphones the first time I listened to a DSD track, 1-bit word depth sampled 2.8M times per second, it was unlike anything I’d ever heard before. I acknowledge that’s not a direct comparison, but all i’m saying is maybe the lossy vs lossless test performed on a low fidelity audio chain where the signal is always meaningfully subject to harmonic distortion before you hear it is the reason most people can’t tell a difference?
I can’t imagine if you compare a 192kbps MP3 with a DSD256 audio file played on reference monitors from a high performance DAC there’d be no audible difference. Personally, using a McIntosh integrated amp and Focal Utopia headphones the first time I listened to a DSD track, 1-bit word depth sampled 2.8M times per second, it was unlike anything I’d ever heard before. I acknowledge that’s not a direct comparison, but all i’m saying is maybe the lossy vs lossless test performed on a low fidelity audio chain where the signal is always meaningfully subject to harmonic distortion before you hear it is the reason most people can’t tell a difference?